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ok not sure everyone understands what the point of an avatar really is from a design/UI perspective...especially in todays mobile/tablet day in age. The point/purpose of an avatar as switched from what we generally have used it for in the past. Its no longer just a way of personalizing a profile. Its also a visual queue to your user. From a UI perspective an avatar is associated by users with there name or there profile. This provides a standardized visual queue that we relate to the username which means we have a very scalable replacement for the user name in some places where displaying a string of text is not really possible on small screens or even large screens without allowing for *beep* up layouts.

take github for example when viewing a PR, all the commits a prepended by an avatar so you know who committed it. There is no username displayed, instead its alt text and the avatar is the link to the profile. This is done to allow for the commit msg to have the necessary space on all devices.

We can set a template variable for NO_AVATAR and use it to only display the avatar if its true for those who do not want to use the default avatar or for the situations where the style author may not want a default. This is an edge case but this allows for far better control for the style author in a much cleaner way of doing things.

We should still keep the global disable toggle...Thats fine it should have no effect if they are disabled altogether. If the admin makes this choice they will most likely choose/modify the theme to fix any minor display issues with the use of avatars.

ok not sure everyone understands what the point of an avatar really is from a design/UI perspective...especially in todays mobile/tablet day in age. The point/purpose of an avatar as switched from what we generally have used it for in the past. Its no longer just a way of personalizing a profile. Its also a visual queue to your user. From a UI perspective an avatar is associated by users with there name or there profile. This provides a standardized visual queue that we relate to the username which means we have a very scalable replacement for the user name in some places where displaying a string of text is not really possible on small screens or even large screens without allowing for *beep* up layouts.

I respectfully disagree with your generalizations. While what you say about avatars might be true for some (and even most) of the boards, at least at my forums there are a lot of people who:
a) change their avatars on a regular basis;
or
b) abstain from using avatars at all (myself included).

I think that from UX perspective, an improvement in avatar upload/setup process, which is currently extremely clunky and requires user to pre-process images before the upload, would make a much more positive impact on usability. Something similar to this ext, for example: https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtop ... &t=2343741, would be much appreciated.

yes that is a caused by a bug. it was not necessarily caused by that pr but was made apparent by that pr. https://tracker.phpbb.com/browse/PHPBB3-15233 which caused this discussion. It has nothing to do with rules. It has to do with the fact that we can not easily control the content the backend returns